About Aurimas Mikalauskas

Aurimas joined Percona in 2006, a few months after Peter and Vadim founded the company. His primary focus is on high performance, but he also specializes in full text search, high availability, content caching techniques and MySQL data recovery.

The other day a customer asked me to do capacity planning for their web server farm. I was looking at the CPU graph for one of the web servers that had Hyper-threading switched ON and thought to myself: “This must be quite a misleading graph – it shows 30% CPU usage. It can’t really be […]

This blog post was inspired by my visit at the annual Zabbix Conference in Riga, Latvia this year, where I gave a couple of talks on MySQL and beyond. It was a two day single-track event with some 200 participants, a number of interesting talks on Zabbix (and related technologies) and really well-organized evening activities. […]

MySQL 5.6 has a great many new features, including, but certainly not limited to a number of performance improvements. However, besides the widely talked-about features such as InnoDB support for full text search, optimizer, performance schema improvements and GTID, there are also a few tiny improvements that nobody cared to mention. One such feature is…

Queries in MySQL, Sphinx and many other database or search engines are typically single-threaded. That is when you issue a single query on your brand new r910 with 32 CPU cores and 16 disks, the maximum that is going to be used to process this query at any given point is 1 CPU core and […]

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but […]

While we do have many blog posts on replication on our blog, such as on replication being single-threaded, on semi-synchronous replication or on estimating replication capacity, I don’t think we have one that covers the very basics of how MySQL replication really works on the high level. Or it’s been so long ago I can’t […]

We are doing a migration from Amazon RDS to EC2 with a customer. This, unfortunately, involves some downtime – if you are an RDS user, you probably know you can’t replicate an RDS instance to an external server (or even EC2). While it is annoying, this post isn’t going to be a rant on how […]

If you ever had a replication slave that is severely behind, you probably noticed that it’s not catching up with a busy master at a steady pace. Instead, the “Seconds behind master” is going up and down so you can’t really tell whether the replica is catching up or not by looking at just few […]

Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do […]

I used to think one should never look at max_binlog_size, however last year I had a couple of interesting cases which showed that sometimes it may be very important variable to tune properly. I meant to write about it earlier but never really had a chance to do it. I have it now!